ening to the worker an escape into self-employment through
cooperation.

Producers' cooperation, then, was the ambitious program by which the
Order of the Knights of Labor expected to lead the American wage-earning
class out of the bondage of the wage system into the Canaan of
self-employment. Thus the Order was the true successor of the
cooperative movement in the forties and sixties. Its motto was
"Cooperation of the Order, by the Order, and for the Order." Not
scattered local initiative, but the Order as a whole was to carry on the
work. The plan resembled the Rochdale system of England in that it
proposed to start with an organization of consumers--the large and
ever-growing membership of the Order. But it departed radically from the
English prototype in that instead of setting out to save money for the
consumer, it primarily aimed to create a market for the productive
establishments which were to follow. Consumers' cooperation was to be
but a stepping stone to producers' self-employment. Eventually when the
Order had grown to include nearly all useful members of society--so the
plan contemplated--it would control practically the whole market and
cooperative production would become the rule rather than the exception.
So far, therefore, as "First Principles" went, the Order was not an
instrument of the "class struggle," but an association of idealistic
cooperators. It was this pure idealism which drew to the Order of the
Knights of Labor the sympathetic interest of writers on social subjects
and university teachers, then unfortunately too few in number, like Dr.
Richard T. Ely[15] and President John Bascom of Wisconsin.

The other survival in the seventies of the labor movement of the
sixties, which has already been mentioned, namely the trade union
movement grouped around the Cigar Makers' Union, was neither so purely
American in its origin as the Knights of Labor nor so persistently
idealistic. On the contrary, its first membership was foreign and its
program, as we shall see, became before long primarily opportunist and
"pragmatic." The training school for this opportunistic trade unionism
was the socialist movement during the sixties and seventies,
particularly the American branch of the International Workingmen's
Association, the "First _Internationale_," which was founded by Karl
Marx in London in 1864. The conception of _economic_ labor organization
which was advanced by the _Internationale_ in a socialistic